Supporters of Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak flooded into Cairo’s Tahrir Square Wednesday after the president’s opponents dominated the scene for more than a week.
Separated at first by barriers, the rival demonstrators exchanged insults, then began throwing anything they could find at each other, including shoes, rocks and sticks.
Suddenly the barriers came down. People surged toward each other in a chaotic scene that conjured images of a revolution.
Some injured protesters fell. Others stumbled through the crowd. Blood streamed down the faces of the injured.
Many of the injuries were serious, even though demonstrators wrapped sweatshirts and other clothes around their heads to protect themselves from flying stones.

Note the wishful-thinking aspect of the phrase “a chaotic scene that conjured images of a revolution.” The reporter who wrote that is trying to project onto this riot — which is, so far as we can see, merely a riot — a world-historical significance, as if he were reporting from St. Petersburg in 1917.

This picture from today’s Wall Street Journal reminded me that this is what you don’t get, when you have regular elections with honest results — and a resulting government which responds to the people’s wishes.
And then I thought back to the President’s State of the Union address last week and went: Uh-oh.

BTW, please excuse my sarcasm toward today’s riots. For nearly a week, American pundits kept looking at the Egyptian unrest through the prism of “What Does This Mean for Obama?”

It was obvious that the MSM wanted this story to be about Obama, so when the president jumped into this situation, made himself the protagonist of the drama, and then gave his big speech Tuesday night, my reaction was, “OK, that’s it. The Bringer of Light hath spoken, and now we have peace.”

Then I turned my TV to MSNBC this morning and saw the “Morning Joe” crew breathlessly hyping up the Cairo riot and said to myself, “Wait a minute? Why are these guys acting so enthusiastic about deadly violence?”

At which point I realized that NBC had flown its anchor, Brian Williams, to the scene and the network didn’t want the unrest to end before they’d gotten a big ratings boost out of it — and the 24/7 coverage is making it worse. The rioters wouldn’t be rioting if the TV news cameras weren’t there to broadcast the whole thing live. This is like American Idol auditions for jihadis, and now every two-bit student radical in Egypt is trying to get his 15 minutes of fame.